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Saturday, January 01, 2011

The Twins Were Rowing Boats

Image via WikipediaThe twins were rowing boats and I want the money back. What these guys have been able to do already is a travesty to the spirit of entrepreneurship.

They have this attitude that since they were born into money - not money by Zuckerberg standards obviously - and Zuckerberg was merely a dentist's son, they could hire this guy to build them a billion dollar company.

Social networking was not a new idea. And these two automatons were thinking of a dating site. There was Friendster. There was MySpace. There were a dozen dating sites out and about. Having a college level social network was not new either. Some guy at Columbia was already doing it.

So if social networking was not a new idea, and online dating was not a new idea, and a college level social network was not a new idea - anyone who was online at that point might have found it hard to miss any of those - then what was the idea that got stolen?

If you hired the guy, and he was not doing the work, you should have gone ahead and fired him.

That these twins were ever awarded any money is insane. It is harassment. It has to irk.

New York Times: Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On: Whatever their value at the time of the deal, Facebook’s shares have soared since, putting the current worth of the settlement, by some estimates, at more than $140 million. ....... Next month, the twins and Mr. Narendra plan to ask a federal appeals court in San Francisco to undo the deal so they can pursue their original case against Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg, and win a richer payday. They could, though, lose it all. ..... the twins are also at war with the lawyers who helped them win the settlement. The brothers fired them, accused them of malpractice and refused to pay them. A judge recently found for the lawyers, and ordered the twins to pay the 20 percent contingency fee, or $13 million. For now, the money and shares remain in an escrow account. ...... In the past, Mr. Zuckerberg has denied he stole the Facebook idea from the Winklevosses, saying they planned a dating site, not a social network. ..... They grew up in affluence in Greenwich, Conn. ..... As they talked about the Facebook case, no detail was too small to omit, from where they first met Mr. Zuckerberg (the Kirkland House dining room) to the layout of Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm room, to the content of the e-mails he had sent them after they asked him to do computer programming for a Web site called Harvard Connection. They recited arcane facts about the valuation of private companies and even quoted from the Securities Act of 1934 ..... If the court unwinds the agreement, the company will have to decide whether to offer them a richer settlement or face a trial. ..... The roots of the original dispute date to 2003, when Mr. Zuckerberg, then a Harvard sophomore, said he would help the Winklevosses and Mr. Narendra program Harvard Connection, later renamed ConnectU. But Mr. Zuckerberg delayed work on Harvard Connection, and when pressed for answers, stalled, according to the Winklevosses. In February 2004 he released TheFacebook, which eventually became Facebook. ...... days before the settlement, Facebook’s board signed off on an expert’s valuation that put a price of $8.88 on its shares ..... Last year, the Winklevoss brothers completed coursework for a masters in business administration at Oxford. Cameron helped to start Guestofaguest.com..... When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.” They added that Mr. Zuckerberg deserved some credit for “not screwing up” and expanding Facebook into a community of 500 million users. But they believe the fame and fortune is undeserved. ..... Tyler Winklevoss said: “Mark is where he is because we approached him to include him in our idea.”

These two need to be counter sued for wrongful allegation. I say put them behind bars.